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1 Background

The Museum Project has been digitizing archaeological material since the early 1990s. An important part of this work has been the interconnection between the various archival documents, books and images. This paper describes the work we have done in order to connect information from these resources, including the problems we encountered due to the fact that the data from the various collections often do not fit together, at least not without extensive human interaction.

In order to discuss this topic, some of the central archives of the Norwegian archaeological collections must be described briefly. In Norway, many of the administrative tasks of four of the five archaeological regions have traditionally been handled by the university museums. This has resulted in large archives containing everything ranging from excavation reports to police reports, other sites and monuments information in various forms, including printed books, millions of artifacts and their printed catalogues as well as large image collection.

These collections have for the last 15 years been in a process of digitization. Much of this task was delegated by the university museums to the Museum Project and its forerunner. The result of this work is the following digital collections:

Traditionally, an important part of archaeological work has been to locate objects in paper-based collections and describe and interpret the relations between such objects. Today, with the widespread use of databases people sometimes assume that such relations are created by the computer. That, needless to say, is impossible. There are some relations that can be created relatively easily, some that require a great deal of work, and some that are impossible to create.


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